Ref Review : Newcastle – Arsenal: an overwhelming bias

Ref for this match was Mike Jones

The first foul only happened after 12 minutes but the Ameobi kicked Alexis in the chest. Not with hit studs but a high foot making contact should have been punished with a yellow card. Ref Jones let it go and as a result Cabella only a minute later went in from behind on Coquelin when the ball was going out of play. Not showing where the line is drawn can result in other tackles being done.

Arsenal then scored two goals in quick succession that both were valid. On the second one the defender grabbed Giroud who then also used his arms but as Giroud could score the ref was correct in giving him the advantage.

Newcastle then tried to win a few free kicks, with success. Ayoze going down with no contact, should have been booked. Now only a minute later he tried for a penalty and went down when he and Gabriel ran in to each other with no player going even close to the ball. Correct from the ref to give nothing.

After 34 minutes Arsenal made their first real foul in the match. Ramsey handballed and took away a chance that way for Giroud to score a hattrick. In the last minute of the first half Ramsey was called offside but he wasn’t even close to being offside. That could have been a third goal for Arsenal just before half time but it wasn’t to be.

First half score: Overall 75% and if we put weight on the decisions he also got 75%. Looking just at the important decisions his score was only 50%.

Newcastle then scored a valid goal right at the start of the second half. And then the ref had a terrible period in the match where he made nothing but wrong decisions.

First Colback pushed Gabriel in the back that resulted in Newcastle having a corner. From the resulting first cleared corner Chambers touched the next cross with his arm that was away from his body. That should have been a penalty for Newcastle, now play continued and Newcastle had a shot that was saved by Ospina. Of course if the ref had given a foul for Arsenal this situation wouldn’t have happened but still a lucky break for Arsenal.

Williamson then twice went jumping in leading with his arm on Giroud and no fouls were given or not yellow card was issued.

The same can be said when Cabella smashed his forearm in the face of Coquelin who was down on the floor bleeding. That should have been at least another yellow and thus red card for Cabella but nothing was given. And this time the ref really went over the line in dealing with this situation. Coquelin was down on the floor holding his face and bleeding from his broken nose. And the ref allowed Newcastle to continue and they had to chances that both were saved by Ospina.

The instructions are clear in case of a head wound and a player bleeding the game must be stopped immediately. Poor from the ref.

The assistant then joined in the wrong decisions and gave an offside against Giroud who was one on one with the keeper and who was onside. So apart from the not given penalty for handball from Chambers the ref and his assistants didn’t really gave much to Arsenal.

But gradually he recovered from his blip and luckily he was back to normal when Cabella tried to win a penalty. After his dives in the first half he tried again. The replays showed no contact from Koscielny so it was the correct decision to give no penalty. But alas he didn’t stop the game to give a foul against Cabella and give him finally a yellow card for diving.

Second half score: Overall 50% and when we put weight on the decisions it was just 44%. Looking at the important decisions alone his score was only 22%.

Score over the 90 minutes: Overall score was 61,36%. Putting weight on the decisions his scored was 57,81%. Only looking at the important decisions his score was 33.33%.

The bias numbers show that the ref gave all the normal errors in favour of Newcastle. But he also gave one important decision in favour of Arsenal when he didn’t give a penalty for a handball. But still an overwhelming bias in total in favour of Newcastle.

7 comments to Ref Review : Newcastle – Arsenal: an overwhelming bias

The game last night was similar with the ref having a very bad and unfair to Arsenal spell in the second half. Reading should have had several players booked. But it almost seems like this is a new tactic by the refs. Call it fairly straight until Arsenal have the lead then do everything possible to give the other team a chance to come back into the game. It seems this is slightly different than we were seeing previously where the whole intent seemed to be “make sure Arsenal does not win.” Now it seems okay to let Arsenal win as long as the team chasing the game is given all the favors. What do you think?

Burnley and Reading are similar. Reading manager says “Dyche: Burnley are too honest for our own good”. I doubt it.

I would say that both teams are well coached, and they work well as a unit. I don’t think either team has an abundance of talent, but for the most part they make up for it with being well trained.

I am going to pick on a particular pair of incidents. In both games, there were incidents where Aaron Ramsey either got poked in the with a finger, or nearly did. In the Burnley game, this was a “tackle” that is all push and no tackle, And why the defender thinks shoving a player in the head is the thing to do, I have no idea.

I can’t imagine any adult thinks that poking an opponent in the eye with a finger is allowed in any sport. So, if the players are too honest, how should they react to finding that there finger is suddenly close to blinding an opponent? You would think that they would pull their hands away, stop running and hold their arm up looking for the referee to acknowledge their foul. Not continue with play as if nothing happened.

Yet another totally incompetent performance from the PGMO representative – one of the worst – fortunately the attempt to tip the match against us was unsuccessful – we were much better than the Newcastle and PGMO combo.

Sounds a very poor performance, unacceptable in fact.
Interesting new article on the footballisfixed blog spot, he seems to be laying into a ref that can be relatively fair to us.
He also has some interesting views on the selector of referees and his recent removal.

We’ve tried to win or big games in the second half of the season which is quite encouraging as I expect us to thump the Chelsea monkey off our back… And if we can’t, it’s not going to be fatal as we would still be 2nd even after a loss at the umpteenth attempt.

Please note the the RSS feeds do not work in Chrome. Please use IE, Safari or Firefox